“No one will ever love you more than you love your pain,” he had replied, his words ringing even louder in the dark. (p154) - Edwidge Danticat

First novels are a lot like first children. You lavish all your love and attention on them, but you also make all your rookie mistakes on them. First novels teach you how to write. They are your initial opportunity to put into practice everything you’ve heard about long-haul narrative. They’re your primary attempt at trying to walk in the footsteps of the giant (and not so giant) writers you revere and adore.

My work allows me to exorcise my ghosts. I purge the pain from it. The words are my tears on the page. Perhaps I'd be less serene without it. I tend to be melancholy. The work helps me to put that on the page.

What do you think of Bush’s attack on Iraq? ED: That situation could have been resolved in a different way. And the justification—the idea that we have a right to invade another country and determine another people’s destiny—is frightening. And I fear really for the future of that occupation. What happens now, and twenty years from now, and forty years from now, given our case? People in the United States may feel like when we don’t see it on CNN twenty-four hours a day, it sort of disappears. But it doesn’t disappear for the people who have to live under occupation—and their children and their children’s children.